Whitewashing Haiti’s History
Every medium of communication in the world is now overrun with pronouncements about Haiti. Many have been ill-informed, and a few maliciously intemperate. The extreme comments have the effect of making those that are mildly reasonable in tone seem more reliable; some, more so than they deserve. The New York Times, for instance, editorializes about Haiti’s “generations of misrule, poverty and political strife,” as if those nouns were enough to explain the history of Haiti.
Nations have beginnings, and then national histories, and the history of each is unique. I know how obvious that is. But the penchant among journalists and political scientists for creating phony categories such as “kleptocracies,” “developing nations,” and “failed states,” and then using these categories to obstruct serious talk, in this case about Haiti, immobilizes us and conceals the need to uncover the weight of local and particular history.
The New World’s second republic has indeed known political strife, bad leadership, and poverty. But to judge Haiti fairly, it is essential to remember that the country won its independence under the worst imaginable circumstances. The Haitians declared their freedom in 1804, when the New World was mostly made up of European colonies (and the United States) all busily extracting wealth from the labor of millions of slaves. This included Haiti’s neighbors, the island colonies of France, Great Britain, Denmark, and The Netherlands, among others. From the United States to Brazil, the reality of Haitian liberation shook the empire of the whip to the core. Needless to say, no liberal-minded aristocrats or other Europeans joined the rebel side in the Haitian Revolution, as some had in the American Revolution.
The inescapable truth is that “the world” never forgave Haiti for its revolution, because the slaves freed themselves.
By using the sword against their oppressors, the Haitian people turned themselves into Thomas Jefferson’s universal human beings. Yet they were feared and reviled for having done so. International political, economic, and religious ostracism, imposed by their slaveholding neighbors, followed and lasted for close to a century. Not until 1862 did the United States recognize Haiti. What country that profited from slavery could dare to be a good neighbor? The Vatican did not sign a concordat with the new nation until 1860.
After the Revolution, the Haitian people were left to build all the national institutions that a state requires. The term “institution” is used here in a simple way: organizations for the conduct of a society’s social life, whether economic, political, or cultural. This includes a postal system, a system of education, a health system, even a system of roads. Institutions in pre-revolutionary St. Domingue—the colonial name of the territory—served only the one-fifteenth of the population that was free.
After the Revolution, those institutions had to be created anew by Haiti’s citizens—slaves before and now free, perhaps two-thirds of them Africa-born. In their struggle to build a state, the Haitians were obliged to pay 150 million Francs in onerous “indemnities” to the French, on the grounds that the former slaves had until recently been the property of those they defeated. This added burden was backed by the threat of re-invasion. The indemnities were the price of diplomatic recognition by France; debt service would keep the Haitians in economic crisis until the twentieth century.
A country wracked by more than a decade of invasion and revolution, then faced with financial punishment and isolation for scores of years, could not build the internal framework a strong civil society requires. This new, impoverished nation, endowed with a deeply divided class structure and seeking to survive with only the feeblest of institutions, was befriended by no one. Over time, that comfortable phrase—“misrule, poverty, and political strife”—now used to explain everything in Haiti, became more and more applicable.
For now, it is enough to focus on Haiti’s horrifying and urgent needs. But there should come an opportunity for the world to address seriously the broad challenges the country faces. Those challenges will be better understood if the distinctive, historically endowed character of the Haitian people is recognized.
Comments
Tweet
About the Author
Sidney W. Mintz, Research Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, is author of many books, including Caribbean Transformations and Sweetness and Power. Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations is forthcoming in March.
Related Articles
This article is part of our Haiti Reading List along with:
Colin Dayan,
“Civilizing” Haiti
Noam Chomsky,
Crisis and Hope
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee,
Making Aid Work
Patrick Erouart-Siad,
The Wound and the Dream
Keep in touch with Boston Review
Maybe there should, but there won't. The rest of the world will keep sinking money and people into Haiti until a new story comes along and the media shifts its attention elsewhere. The winter olympics are in a couple of weeks, and there's no Haitian bobsled team.
Or a tight word-count. You don't honestly believe that the author is a shill for U.S. interests, do you? You don't seriously suspect that one of the most important ethnographers of the Caribbean in literally any field is unaware of the history of U.S. intervention in Haiti? Mintz chose to focus on a topic and leave unaddressed another that's extensively discussed in other pieces on this very website. Maybe it's not that he's ignorant, but that you don't really get how this writing thing works. Comprehensiveness is a not always a prerequisite.
birthrate issue in Haiti, surely a problem that adds to all its many other problems.
African-Americans are still fighting for the right to be equal....a lot of white children are still reaping the benefits of money made from slavery and would rather buy a Picasso painting for $110Million than pay reparations for slavery.If African-Americans had to fight and die for their own freedoms and rights in the 1900s what intelligent person doesn't see how even more difficult the journey was/is for a small island of freed slaves like Haiti??Take off your designer glasses people.
The Louisiana Purchase was $15Million Francs and Haiti was $150Million Francs.Pick up a history book and study the size of the 2 locations.Apparently slaves are too ignorant to read and write but they can pay France a racist ridonkeylous sum of money for something that was theirs at birth...their freedom.France should be ashamed...the audacity of white folk to keep pretending they ever had a right to own a human being.